Three years ago, when I first felt the Holy Ghost nudging me, saying that I needed to do bilingual instruction, I was paralyzed by my own inadequacy and perfectionism, and terrified to try. I didn't know the words. I didn't know where to get the words. It was just me and the dictionary on my phone, and I was pretty certain that wasn't enough.
Mrs. C. said it was.
Mrs. C is an expert: she teaches at a local bilingual immersion school. I figured if anybody knew what is possible, she would. So I started trying. I don't know that I would have been brave enough to follow where the Lord was leading me, had she not been so encouraging; He gave me exactly what I needed when He arranged for us to sit around by the pool chatting about how bilingual teaching works while our kids splashed around during swim lesson time.
This was before I discovered the HiNative app, and I only knew one person that was fluent, so I sent her a couple of Facebook messages, asking about math words and phrases. Only, while she said she was happy to help me learn Japanese, she wasn't very interested in talking about math phrases: she said, "It's exactly the same as in English." And it is. Which is why it's been such a great place for us to start: math has its own terminology, and it really is very similar, even when the languages are as dissimilar and English and Japanese.
In the past, we've done some work with numbers, and practiced both addition and subtraction in Japanese using math cards, but because of my limited vocabulary, all of the explanations and actual teaching have always been in English. Today, I finally had enough Japanese to actually do the majority of the lesson in Japanese! I did make sure that there was plenty of physical cues with pointing at or moving the rods, and a few key points I did in both English and Japanese, but the vast majority was done in our second language. Peanut didn't seem to care one way or another; she's had Japanese around to one degree or another nearly since she was born, and she just takes it in stride most of the time, but I was super excited and singing inside through the whole lesson!
We started out with some Cuisenaire Rods, which she is already familiar with and reasonably comfortable with working with them to figure things out. I had her build a staircase, and then we grabbed a green six rod, and started working on some number-bonds kind of things. We didn't call it that, because I have no idea what kind of name you'd give that concept in Japanese, but it was number bonds work, where we were emphasizing the small numbers that add up to six.
It was interesting, chatting at her in Japanese, and having her respond to me in English. That's how she did most of it, though as she was trying to figure out what number the larger rods represented, I was able to nudge her into doing some of the counting in Japanese. Realistically, to just have me speaking Japanese and her understanding is pretty huge, and I'm really happy with this kind of progress at this point: receptive language precedes expressive language, and she was doing well with a significant increase in the amount of Japanese that she was hearing.
After we built the rod model of all the ways you can add whole numbers to get six, we finished the lesson by going back and writing down the addition problems to represent our work with the rods. This required me to learn some new words: just like we tend to read a problem, "four plus two is six", the Japanese have a similar phrase, but when it came to actually writing the equations, I needed to go with her character by character. I did the first couple, to help her figure out what the heck we were up to, since I knew she was also coping with a bunch of new words, and then had her finish up. Additionally, I needed to ask her if she knew how to write a couple of the numbers --and I'd never tried to say that before. So I made something up, said it, and while she worked, I quick typed my sentence in on HiNative. There are frequently enough Japanese native users on that answers to questions come within just a couple of minutes, and happily, today things were quite quick AND it turned out I was actually already asking my question in a natural way (woot!).
Excited by this success, I tried to pull more Japanese into one of her brothers' lesson, but I haven't looked up the words for multiplication or division yet, and he was converting measurements which was fine when it was centimeters and meters, but when I needed to talk about liters that was a problem. He's also generally less comfortable with the ambiguity that is inherent in working in a new language: he wants to know that he understands, and to be fair, converting measurements is considerably more involved than counting to six! But we did make a nice connection between all those prefixes you see in metric measurements and our Latin work, and that was a fun lightbulb moment: I don't think he's going to have any trouble keeping them all straight.
I still haven't really figured out how to bring this kind of success to other areas of study: my vocabulary is still quite small, and the kids have even fewer words. But the good news is, even with small vocabularies, we're all definitely making consistent progress, and that is hugely encouraging.
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